Passion for Engineering

The following is not new. It has been making the rounds on the internet for quite some time. I like it and I feel like sharing it.

Binding developers into writting documentation

Looking at the work done by the BRL-CAD developers to produce a Google backed physical book about contributing to the project I am shocked. It is remarkable just how much effort programmers will put into documentation. The only thing I can see which makes this situation unique is the promise of a printed bound copy if they make the deadlines. I like anything that gets people to make documentation but in a world where everyone seems to be high on ebooks the idea of this level of dedication for paper is just weird. To me it is like they are competing for an audio book version done on vinyl record.

That said I totally want a bound copy and am so jealous of the people who will be receiving them. As a person who has been trying for longer than I care to admit to contribute to gEDA/PCB I really wish they could have participated. This brings me to the elephant in the room. I know Google's backing of BRL-CAD is probably based on their long term plans to use parts of it's code base or poach developer talent. You can tell they have good reasons for picking up some projects and not others unlike the earlier days when google's summer of code seemed to fund every project that applied. Yes they just got smarter about weeding out the projects that were junk/vaporware/impossible but with the programs scale backs I can only imagine they are focused on funding things indirectly useful to their ends.

This brings me back to documentation. If they are this keen on the projects being documented it is because they are interested not just in spotting talent but in the long term viability of the projects. I am not saying that they are distorting the open source scene in a bad way. Far from it. The found a novel way to get people to do the right thing by their work. Just that deserves a big cheer. I just wish I there was more transparency about what if anything motivated them.

I should add just in closing that the BRL-CAD people were producing some stellar documentation before all of this. My issues with contributing to gEDA are mostly my own and not really with gEDA but with PCB. (I have to say gEDA/PCB to refer to PCB because there are too many PCBs on the net)

Play well with others

Macbook Pro 2012 and Linux

There have been a lot of people talking about running Linux on the Macbook Pro Retina but I don't have the Retina just a Macbook Pro 2012 with HD display and SSD. The Gentoo Documentation is in need of an update. As of today the newest hardware it covers is the early 2011 Macbook Pro. I used to post a lot of stuff to the Gentoo Wiki but I can not invest my time in that any more since the last 2 times I did that the site had disk issues and ended up loosing the stuff I posted. That is a side rant. Tonight is just about the initial issues of installing Gentoo on a none-Retina 2012 Macbook Pro

The keyboard has an odd mapping but that works. There is code floating around to flip the function keys with the special function ones but I like having the same mental training in Linux that I use in MacOS. The audio works well with the hda-intel module. With the b43 module and mac80211 layer the 802.11b/g/n works very well. To solve some of the problems I was having with the nvidia proprietary driver I had to switch to booting with ReFind from the ReFit install I had been using. This solves my problems with Apples some what exotic EFI implementation. The drawback to ReFind is that that to use it I have to boot off of a removable media or void the warranty by installing it on the machine directly. This has reduced me to booting off of a USB stick until the coverage expires. Apple I don't like your policy on this. Please change it or this will be my first and last Mac. Finally the SD-Card slot which worked perfectly when I used ReFit does not work under ReFind. I suspect this is because of some USB mode-setting issue. The camera also worked perfectly under ReFit is out of commission on ReFind boot. To be honest I will investigate this later.

My big grip is that even which all this the graphics chipset is still burning watts and I don't like the heat. nVidia has released some stuff for graphics switching with their module. I had been trying to use bumblebee but it has too many issues even if it has a better architecture for what I am doing. This is a shame but it is the truth. I really like the DMA-Buf work that has been done but again that code reaching maturity is far in the future in my humble opinion. I was on the mail list and did some testing of the earlier releases of the open sourced Broadcom driver. I did the same for the ACX11 from TI back in the day too. I am tired of doing that kind of thing. I still want to pay back to the open source community but I don't want to invest myself in getting basic things to work. I guess I have become spoiled but my time is just worth more to me now in other areas than in this. The good news is that other than nVidia and Broadcom most vendors are warming to the idea of doing open source modules I feel because of Android. Sorry but my nature is very tangential.

Finally to force the fan to keep things cooler I installed macfanctld and tweaked some constants to make the thermal zone lower. I should alter the program because by default it does not monitor all the thermal sensors. It was written with the naive idea that only the CPU or GPU matter. To be fair to the author the MacBook Pro has like 30 temperature sensors. The number of sensors and what they do seems to change between hardware revisions. I will probably revise this code more later.

Next I will probably post some stuff on my actual projects and not just more on this day to day.


-Evan

2013.05.19-Added news

I realized today that a while ago when I changed kernels I failed to include the kernel modules for the webcam so to make the device work follow the same directions used on the other models.
here
I don't recommend the whole document series of posts because they are for the earlier model and so the really good stuff on graphics switching in there doesn't work as yet. The older model has an ATI card while the new (2012 model) has nVidia. The architecture has also changed. I believe the ATI card was muxed at the output while the new "hybrid graphics" system works in a much more complex concept now. I suspect the mux however may still be there for when the Intel GPU is totally deactivated. If you really want to understand this just check the official documentation.

-Evan

A slow move

to a new home

I used to have a proper space to host my projects at NEU but since I graduated they removed my stuff. I know storage space for them was not cheap and I suspect that they wanted to retire the farm of Sun stations it was all hosted on. This is all going to be a little less organized and more stream of consciousness. I am hoping that labels, tags or what ever will help solve this. I am not happy about the move but I don't have an alternative *nix host for it.

-Evan